Afghanistan

The following article can be found on https://www.freewomenwriters.org, a sister organisation run by WLUML networker Noorjahan Akbar. Free Women Writers works to improve the lives of Afghan women through advocacy, storytelling, and education.

Dear readers,

The year is almost at its end. We want to take some time to thank each and every one of you for your support and solidarity throughout 2017 and share some of the year’s highlights with you.

Today, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court ("ICC" or "the Court"), Fatou Bensouda, requested authorisation from the Court's Judges to initiate an investigation into alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, committed in the context of the ongoing armed conflict in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan ("Afghanistan").

In March 2015, a violent, hysterical mob beat, torched, and killed a woman, ran her over with a car, made her face unrecognizable, and threw her corpse in the Kabul river. Thousands of onlookers watched on like it was a spectacle to be enjoyed, not intervening, and hence, adding to the brutality.

The woman’s crime? “Burning the Quran”—which, as substantial evidence proved later, was an entirely false allegation.

The murder of Farkhunda Malikzada, an Afghan religious scholar who had dedicated her life to fighting superstitions within the religious community, shocked the world in March 2015. She was killed by a group of more than 100 men who beat her to death, ran her over with a car and then set her on fire. She was killed because a senior religious cleric falsely accused her of burning the Quran, according to the BBC.After her death, protests were held to demand justice in Afghanistan and around the world. Despite global and national efforts, the trial for Malikzada was called a failure by many activists because several killers and policemen who watched the murder were recently acquitted.